Russian (156 million speakers)

An East Slavic language, Russian became distinct from Ukrainian and Belorussian during the end of the 14th century.  Its name derived from the Orthodox faith of Kiev, Russ.   Because of years of Tartar rule,   several Turkic words are found in Russian.  Russian consists  of several dialects which differ greatly because of the geographical barriers between different regions.   However, it is uniformly written in the Cyrillic alphabet, which is also used by languages such as Ukrainian, Serbian, and Bulgarian that belong or once belonged to the sphere of the Greek Orthodox Church.

Historical Phonology

In modern Russian stressed e is sometimes not pronounced as ë in places where it once was. Irregularities such as this resulted from historical sound changes. The letter called yat' in old Russian became e in modern Russian, and e under stress in old Russian became ë in modern Russian. For example,

e	£	e (yat')
unstressed	stressed	stressed
eJIb ‘fir'	ëJIKa ‘fir’

 Syntax

In Russian each preposition governs the form (case*) of at least one noun or pronoun following it.  In other words, each of those nouns or pronouns must have the appropriate case ending whenever it is preceded by a preposition.   Most prepositions govern only one case, but some may govern two or three.  The lexical meanings of the prepositions are closely related to the cases.  For example:

+ prepositional	'in, at'
	'He is in the theater.'
+ accusative	'into, to'
	'He went into the theater.'
+ genitive	'out of, from'
	'He went out of the theater.'

* Case is a category of inflectional morphology of nouns. For example,  She (nominative) gave him (accusative) her (genitive) bag.

Russian at Stanford

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